


mind at ease

by agivise



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator, and that's all that really matters, but anyways, mothman's here, this is like my holy trinity of Stupid Tags That I Need To Stop Using
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 20:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16227095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agivise/pseuds/agivise
Summary: the hands, prior to your accidental dismemberment of the drawing, belonged to a sketch of a man named — well, his name’snotactually duck newton, obviously, that would be weird, weirder than “indrid cold”, even, but that’s not important. well, you mean,he’simportant, but his name — less so, you settle on. less so.





	mind at ease

**Author's Note:**

> this user would fucking die for indrid cold, if griffin doesn't write more of him im RIOTING  
> fr tho y'all are sleeping on my boy mothman. if y'all won't make more indrid content then i'll have to do it myself. and Damn i haven't written taz shit in ages i should do that more  
> also if you're unfamiliar with my Garbage Writing Style good luck my dudes it's a mess
> 
> (mild warning for blood/injury but nothing nearly as substantial as my other writing tbh lmao)
> 
> today's song recs: nice boys by temporex and gutter girl by hot flash heat wave

your wings crackle like a match dropped in a puddle as you unfurl them with a frown.

it’s the same sound your wrists make when you hold ‘em much too stiff for much too long, crouched with your spine against the armrest of your torn couch and a sketchbook clutched tight in your hands.

you stretch your clawed fingers out now, listening for the familiar, strained clicking of your skeleton. you’re not particularly cautious with them, not with no one ‘round (as if anyone ever would be unless they were lookin’ for something, in this tiny, sweltering hellhole); as you stretch out your elbows, your claws graze one of the drawings sloppily packing-taped onto the wall, slashing it damn near clear through, knocking a pushpin to the floor in the process. the severed part of the drawing hangs from the slightest sliver of paper — on it, you’d scrawled a coiled sword with a snarling mouth and two hands grasping gracelessly at the hilt. the hands, prior to your accidental dismemberment of the drawing, belonged to a sketch of a man named — well, his name’s _not_  actually duck newton, obviously, that would be weird, weirder than “indrid cold”, even, but that’s not important. well, you mean, _he’s_ important, but his name — less so, you settle on, ripping the sword-piece fully off and tossing it into a stray cup of probably-water to watch the charcoal smudge and bleed. less so.

you rub awkwardly at the patch of fur — well, it’s technically scales, really, but again, not important — at the backs of your wrists, ruffling the blood-red surface to blend it better with the surrounding dark, muted tones.

you see futures where you lift yourself up onto your toes to fix a piece of tape, catch a flash of yellow from the lower half of your wings in the corner of your vision as they shift with your motion, bury your claws gently into the spot where you know the greyed pattern at the nape of your neck to be; in several of these images, the cup with the paper gets knocked to the floor as you do, but with the heat of the trailer, it’ll evaporate soon enough, won’t it? no harm done. not worth toying with.

you pause and let the images play out for a while. in four of the futures, the wet charcoal seeps out from the paper and leaves a dark stain. _unfavorable._ you fish the scrap from the water and dump the remainders of the cup down the drain. as you do this, you see another two clips play out — one with you grumbling and pinning something back up to the wall, and another, substantially more likely one, where the discarded tack cuts open your foot while your disguise is up, slicking your human feet and, soon enough, human hands and human hair, with streaks of dark, cold blood.

you sigh, pluck the tack from the floor, and pin the soggy scrap of paper back in its original place. you’ll replace it with another drawing, a nicer one, the next time you — er, _if_ you have another vision of duck’s future. (nah, actually, don’t kid yourself, you _know_ you’ll keep crossing paths with mister prettyboy chosenone. his destiny a trainwreck in every sense but a literal one, and even _that’s_ debatable.)

preferably, you’d like to have a chance to draw one where he’s smiling, or at least neutral in expression, though those’re real rare for him. he seems like a rather frowny man. one who’s often dragged into rather frowny circumstances.

you glance over at your towering stack of filled, wrecked, and otherwise unusable sketchbooks. in the one second-nearest to the top, there are eighteen consecutive pages full to the brim with increasingly abstract and haunting illustrations of the lady flame. you took an exceedingly rare trip to the grocer’s earlier today for the sole purpose of grabbing something orange to draw with. the closest you could find was a box of children’s crayons, but it'll do the job just fine. you don’t know why, you don’t know the details, at least, but you _needed_ that orange for the drawing to be finished. you grab the sketchbook from the tower and flip to one of the final pages. on it is — well, it’d be repulsively modest to call it a “sketch”. you spent many hours on this one. it’s a fully rendered work, one of your best pieces, in all honesty.

this doesn’t feel like a choice for you, really. it barely even feels like a premonition. it just feels like a _threat._ and you can’t even tell who the threat’s against.

you hover the orange crayon over the portrait, sigh, and scrawl a heavy-handed orange _X_ across her right eye.

without your glasses on, everything feels like it’s tinted a sickly green — not the green of the forest around you, not the green of the lime jello cup shoved in the back of your fridge, but the green of a fluorescent-lit truck stop bathroom where an entirely-theoretical, definitely-not-a-haunting-memory-of-your-past murder might (completely hypothetically) take place.

the point is, the orange doesn’t quite look like the sunglass-tinted version of orange you’ve gotten so used to seeing these past decades. the drawing still doesn’t look right, not yet, not like this. you set the drawing on your counter and grab your glasses from where you’ve left them on the floor, placing them back over your eyes in a single, practiced motion.

your wings fold back in on themselves. the needle-like teeth within your mouth smooth out against the tip of your tongue. you are cold. you are very cold.

as your hands shift back to human, the lenses feel cool and impersonal on your fingertips. shockingly, they don’t seem to smudge or scratch too easy, no matter how careless you get with them. probably the magic, but fuck if you know, really. either way, you see through them nice and clear as ever when you look back over at the drawing.

the orange almost _glows_ though the red lenses. it looks terrifyingly familiar, but you just can’t put your finger on which part of it you’ve seen before.

you do feel calmer, though. less like there’s a compulsion tugging at the back of your mind. it’s nice.

now, you see ten futures. in five, you return the sketchbook to various places in the stack, where it will be hidden and eventually forgotten and ignored, and in five, you rip it to shreds, irreparable and irreplaceable.

you don’t like these futures very much, so you tape the drawing to your wall instead, as a quiet “fuck you” to destiny.

the pin from earlier falls to the floor again. you sigh and leave it where it is.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are my eggnog, my lifeblood, my muse,


End file.
